The valuable details existing in the annals of China, and but recently known in Europe, enable us to trace this famous comet with a high degree of probability to the year 11 before the Christian era, - a most important circumstance, not only as regards the history of this particular comet, but as bearing on the constitution of these bodies in general.

Cameras outside a University of Wisconsin-Madison facility captured the moment a meteoroid streaked across the night sky.

The University of Wisconsin-Madison's Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies shared footage from a webcam mounted atop the building that captured the fireball's fall from the sky Monday night.

A whale-sized asteroid has come frighteningly close to the Earth - within one-third of the distance between the Earth and the moon. What's more, NASA failed to spot the space rock until it had already passed.

The rock is estimated to have a diameter of between six and 32 meters, which would translate into enough destructive power to level a major city. The colossal mass came within 73,000 miles (117,480km) of us in early November.

According to The Watchers, a website that monitors the path of asteroids in our solar system, NASA's Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii spotted the asteroid on November 10. However, at that point, it was already heading back out to space after having skimmed the Earth just one day before.

Comment: NASA can't warn us of an asteroid they can't see and using a 'space lasso' to prevent incoming threats probably won't work either. We're on our own, folks!

The dust that comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko emits into space consists to about one half of organic molecules. The dust belongs to the most pristine and carbon-rich material known in our solar system and has hardly changed since its birth. These results of the COSIMA team are published today in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. COSIMA is an instrument onboard the Rosetta spacecraft, which investigated comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko from August 2014 to September 2016. In their current study, the involved researchers including scientists from the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research (MPS) analyze as comprehensively as ever before, what chemical elements constitute cometary dust.

The astronomer community at Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University used its own Astro-Model simulation environment to produce a virtual image of object 3200 Phaethon approaching the Earth, plus the expected Geminids meteor shower.

December 17, 2017 will see an interesting astronomic event in the form of object 3200 Phaethon approaching our planet. This is a fairly large asteroid nearly 5 kilometers in diameter, which will fly past the Earth within 10 million kilometers, close by space standards.

The asteroid derives its name from its unusual orbit that in perihelia brings it closer to the Sun than any other named asteroid (20 million kilometers). To compare: Mercury, the closest planet to the Sun in the Solar system, is 46 million kilometers from the Sun.

Comment: This is the closest crossing by one of many asteroids threatening our planet of late:

This huge asteroid is thought to cause the beautiful Geminids meteor shower which will take place between December 13 and 14, causing hundreds of bright meteors to illuminate the night sky as they burn up in Earth's atmosphere.

Locals of Breiðdalsvík in East Iceland wondered if the aliens were actually coming on Tuesday when they were surprised by strange lights shooting across the sky.

According to local paper Austurfrétt the blue-green light shot across the sky at an incredible speed. One of the witnesses was Hrafnkell Hannesson who says he was at the supermarket when the lights appeared.

In October astronomers were surprised by a visitor that came racing into our Solar System from interstellar space. Now, researchers using the Gemini Observatory have determined that the first known object to graze our Solar System from beyond is similar to, but definitely not, your average asteroid or comet. "This thing is an oddball," said Karen Meech of the University of Hawaii's Institute for Astronomy who leads an international team studying this interstellar interloper.

Originally denoted A2017 U1, the body now goes by the Hawaiian name 'Oumuamua, in part because of its discovery by Meech's team using the Pan-STARRS1 survey telescope on Haleakala in Hawai'i. When discovered in mid-October 'Oumuamua was only about 85 times the Earth-Moon distance away and its discovery was announced in early November.

Since its discovery 'Oumuamua has faded from view. The object's rapidly increasing distance from the Earth and Sun now makes it too faint to be studied by even the largest telescopes.

"Needless to say, we dropped everything so we could quickly point the Gemini telescopes at this object immediately after its discovery," said Gemini Director Laura Ferrarese who coordinated the Gemini South observations for Meech's group.

For long the origin of the Ramgarh crater has been a subject of debate among researchers. While some believe that it was caused by 'meteorite impact', others are of the view that it evolved from 'tectonic' or 'structural' activity or 'magmatism'.

For years the crater - located near Ramgarh village, about 12 km east of Mangrol - has been considered as a 'meteorite impact' site, but the theory lacked unambiguous evidence. However, a study by geologist Satyanarayan Rana has found diagnostic evidence of 'meteorite impact' at the crater.

Rana, a research scholar at the department of geology, Mohanlal Sukhadia University (MSU), Udaipur, has found evidence in the form of shatter cones in sandstones, planar deformation features (PDFs) and planar fractures (parallel sets of multiple planar cracks) in quartz grains.

Shatter cones are rare geological features and are only known to form in the bedrock beneath meteorite impact craters or underground nuclear explosions. PDFs are also formed by extreme shock compressions on the scale of meteor impacts.

"This regional geological structure has invited the interest of various geologists throughout the world since its discovery and the past five decades have witnessed a number of theories on the origin of this structure, but the issue of origin remained debatable," the 33-year-old PhD researcher, who started his research in 2013 and he completed it in April this year.